A feast for foodies in the Rhône valley

With three Michelin restaurants and an abundance of culinary talent, Valence is an essential pit stop for Anthony Peregrine

From the outside, France presently appears a country in crisis. On the inside, the French are eating. Simple as that. Irritations come and go, but it is the mark of a great nation to pursue its destiny regardless. In France this includes perfecting roast pigeon, finding precisely the right marriage for a CrozesHermitage 2011 – and, just the other week, throwing themselves bodily into the sixth national Festival of Gastronomy. Countrywide, le peuple is celebrating itself, its produce, its cooking and its ability to dine as if dining were a virtue.

I was in Valence, in the Rhône valley, for the festival. The town centre was immersed in meat and cheese, fruit, veg and wine. Market stalls strained under abundance, there was open-air brunch, chefs cooking for all, and one – Baptiste Poinot – chopping and stirring to the rhythms of a DJ mix.

Valence, in short, handled the festival with ardent conviviality. This underlines that the mid-sized county capital (pop: 62,000) is the finest French gastronomic destination that you’ve hardly heard of. It’s no accident that the town is also planning a centre to showcase Gallic culinary excellence, the Cité de la Gastronomie, due in 2019. This will make it the Rhône valley linchpin of what proponents are already calling the Vallée Internationale de la Gastronomie. The French rarely cede to the temptations of false modesty.

Anyway, as linchpins go, you couldn’t find a happier one. I came away full of wine, reconciled with mackerel and (despite serious efforts) having found no one I wouldn’t want to share it with. For the foreseeable future, this is my favourite food spot. There are good reasons. The town is miraculously placed where all the stuff you need for a terrific meal flows in from nearby: the lower Alps, the Ardèche, the Rhône plain, Provence

Essentials Where to stay The Hotel de France is a fourstar establishment with double rooms from £75 (hotelvalence.com).

Where to eat

Maison Pic, 285 Avenue Victor Hugo (annesophie-pic.com).

La Cachette, 20 Rue Notre-Dame de Soyons (0033 474 552413).

Flaveurs, 32 Grande Rue (baptistepoinot.fr).

L’Epicerie, 18 Place St Jean (lepicerie-pierreseve.fr).

Nivon, 17 Avenue Sémard (nivon.com).

Les Bouteilles, 8 Rue Vernoux (lesbouteilles.fr). and the great vineyards – Côte Rôtie, Condrieu, Hermitage, St Joseph – which climb upriver towards Lyon. There are apparently local pigs, though I didn’t spot any.

And, as you know, man has been streaming up and down the Rhône valley – the corridor between the Alps and Massif Central mountains – ever since he’s been moving at all. There’s a tradition of north-south exchange and of passers-through needing feeding. Put all this together and you have a backlog of terrific eating. In the Thirties, a certain André Pic put the advantages to good use, establishing the Maison Pic for the more discerning Med-bound motorist. Thus was founded Valence’s contemporary gastro-celebrity. In the hands of André’s granddaughter, Anne-Sophie, Pic remains the sort of place where arriving in anything less than an Audi lowers the tone. Here is the sort of hushed imperial awe where customers are automatically considered discerning, and much hangs on one’s choice of bread.

I’d already lunched in Pic’s threestar restaurant, where €110 (£99) had bought a meal idiosyncratically brilliant enough to illustrate the difference between a great and a merely excellent chef. I popped my head in this time – the atmosphere was of a cathedral, lunching as worship – and repaired directly to Miss Pic’s brand new brasserie next door. Like her grand-dad, it’s called “André”. It serves trad dishes he mastered and buzzes like a wine bar at chucking-out time. Frankly – what with mackerel escabéche, mullet, good company and only €32 (£29) damage – I was more content there than among the Michelin stars along the corridor. Anyway… Miss Pic, is expanding into London this December, at the new Four Seasons Hotel near the Tower.

And so the gastronomic jaunt continued, to La Cachette, in the lower town, almost Rhône-side. This is the realm of Masashi Ijichi. He arrived in France from Japan in 2000, speaking three words of French: “bonjour” and “au revoir”. (“In Britain, that’s bilingual,” I said.) He has worked his way up to his own Michelin-starred restaurant by, among many other things, preparing the finest possible pigeon dish. There’s foie gras and.... well, you taste it. It will change your outlook on pigeon, conceivably forever.

There is much besides. “Early on, a lady customer saw me, a Japanese, in the kitchen and said: ‘I don’t want to eat dog!’ ” he said. “That doesn’t happen much now.” I walked away, convinced of the brotherhood of man.

It was but a hop to the renewed Valence Museum. An attractive aspect of Valence as gastro-destination is that there’s not a vast amount to divert you from eating and drinking. This is a fine old town, on the cusp of the Midi, so home to narrow streets and an openness of squares and spirit.

It’s a lovely place to stroll but there’s little you absolutely must see – bar the museum. In best provincial fashion, this wanders all over the shop, prehistory through to contemporary art, rich in classical mosaics and the works of the famous 18th-century French artist Hubert Robert, of whom I’d never heard. Two hours here would be good, three better.

Thus was I set up for dinner at Flaveurs, the third of Valence’s